Mark Miller has been a writer — journalist, critic, author, historian —and photographer in the field of music, specifically jazz, for some 50 years. He is the author of 13 books, and served from 1978 to 2005 as the jazz columnist for “Canada’s National Newspaper,” The Globe and Mail. He has also written for Coda Magazine, Down Beat, The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, Saturday Night and several other popular and scholarly publications.
His interests as an author and historian lie in musicians and stories that have been lost, forgotten or overlooked in the annals of jazz. His books include several studies of jazz in Canada — notably Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949 (1998) and The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada (2001) — and a survey of the pioneering American musicians who introduced jazz to Europe, Asia and South America, Some Hustling This! — Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929 (2005).
He has also written the biographies High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Valaida Snow (2007), Herbie Nichols: A Jazzist’s Life (2009), Claude Ranger: Canadian Jazz Legend (2017), Of Stars and Strings: A Biography of Sonny Greenwich (2020) and Oneliness: The Life and Music of Brian Barley (2021), as well as the biographical studies Cool Blues: Charlie Parker in Canada, 1953 (1989) and Way Down That Lonesome Road: Lonnie Johnson in Toronto, 1965-1970 (2011). Some of his several thousand articles for The Globe and Mail were anthologized in A Certain Respect for Tradition: Mark Miller on Jazz, Selected Writings 1980-2005 (2006).
Miller has been described as “the dean of Canadian jazz journalists”(The Jazz Report, Spring 1998) and is praised for the clarity of his writing and the depth of his research. He lives in Toronto.
